Special Needs
Permaculture Farms
FKK have been working alongside 14 special units across Tigania West to remediate situations of drought and crop failure.
Rehema Centre
Starting an early intervention program in 2021 to enable children and empower parents’
APT Workshop
Making assisted aids in the Appropriate Paper Technology (APT) Workshop for children living with Cerebral Palsy.
Strategy
In many cultures disability is attributed to the presence of sin in the disabled person. Read about our strategy to shift attitudes
Mother to Mother Playgroups
These Mother to Mother playgroups currently operate from 8 local health dispensaries, they fulfill a key role in connecting us to parents of young special needs children.
Physio Clinics
Our mobile Physio clinics rotate weekly through 5 different centres and are staffed by Physio’s from local hospitals.
Special Unit Permaculture Farms
The community of Tigania West comprises mainly of subsistence farmers relying on rain fed agriculture to sustain them. Recently there have been several total crop failures due to lack of adequate rainfall. This is creating severe food shortages and famine. This affects the whole community but in particular the disabled community. In 2016 the Sub County nutrition officer assessed 30 disabled children in this locality and found that 4 had severe malnutrition, and 11 had moderate acute malnutrition, this equates to 50% being assessed as malnourished.
FKK have been working alongside all 14 special units across Tigania West to remediate this situation. A feeding program was established in 2013, children with disabilities are fed morning porridge and lunch during term time. This program was evaluated in 2016 and seen to be effective but not sustainable if funding was always required from overseas. In 2017 it was agreed with the Special Units and District Education Office that Irrigated School Farms would be built at each unit. Special Needs children have a vocational curricula, a school farm would enable them to learn farming techniques and also to grow food to be used in the feeding program.
Funding was secured through Rotary to build these farms, all 14 will be complete in 2020.
They comprise of water harvesting off the school roofs, storage in 75,000 water tanks, with a drip irrigation system. With funding from Lush Cosmetics special unit teachers are being trained and supported to develop the land along permaculture principles.
From 2019 Special Needs youngsters have been working on these farms and harvesting food. We are now on the journey of developing a support network around each farm to ensure they develop and support these special needs communities for years to come.
The Rehema Early Intervention Centre
About Rehema Centre
Enabling children and empowering parents within the special needs community in Tigania West, Meru County.
Rural life is frequently hard regardless of whether you are disabled or able bodied. With recurring droughts and subsequent famines many parents struggle to feed children, and many children drop from school due to lack of fees. But set within these already challenging conditions, children living with disability also frequently face isolation, abandonment, acute malnutrition, minimal access to medical services, and in many cases, are living in extreme poverty and squalor.
Such children living with disabilities can develop very severe complications as they have not received early intervention. Stigma is also great in the community. Most people do not understand that disability is nobody’s fault; genetic and medical complications have caused the disability in the vast amount of cases. For the last five years Friends of Kianjai Kenya (FKK) have been working alongside Special Needs teachers and health professionals across Tigania West to improve outcomes for these children. We have introduced Community Workshops to educate parents and the wider community, run feeding programs and a mobile physiotherapy clinic– but for some children more is needed.
Traditionally the parents and guardians of special needs children have received no education or support on how to care for their child. This has been hugely stressful and often overwhelming for the parents involved. We believe that through a child specific health and education program parents and guardians of special needs children will be able to support their children to lead meaningful lives despite their physical and mental limitations.
APT Workshop at the Rehema Centre
Making assisted aids in the Appropriate Paper Technology (APT) Workshop
Over the last few years FKK have been increasingly aware of the limitations that the children experience because they have no assisted aids. The lack of suitable chairs, standing frames or wheelchairs means that many Special Needs children are living without dignity and in pain and discomfort. Many children are in this situation. If we tried to provide typical specialist chairs for these children the cost would be exorbitant, but we can provide good quality aids cheaply, by using Appropriate Paper Technology (APT), basically making them from card and paper!
Continued…
Using this technique which has been developed for Africa by Cerebral Palsy Africa, we can create chairs and standing frames from resources that are normally thrown away to literally lift these children out of the dirt
To help address this need funds were raised in 2015 to build a workshop to manufacture assisted aids. The workshop was opened in Feb 2016, and a small physio team from the UK visited to train a local group on the technique. Now a year on the workshop is operating with four parents of disabled children there on a regular basis and the local Orthotist there once a week to assist in measurements. In the first year they produced over 40 aids. Click the button to follow the story, and watch the videos below…
APT Workshop Open Day - Putting Brown Paper on a Chair - Video
First Clients Arrive for Fitting the Chairs!
Special Unit Feeding Program
Special Unit teachers have identified the following three benefits of the feeding program since its inception:
Reduced absenteeism in Special Units
A higher number of disabled children enrolled in the Special Units
Better Physical health of the children
In the words of one teacher, ‘In fact I have seen a big change since we introduced the feeding program. Our pupils have really improved health wise. Children who were very much emaciated have improved. The little they get at school is helping them. They go for summer holiday for one month and when they return they are not as strong as they were when they left us. At home many only get one meal a day. This challenge is very common, I hear it from every special unit teacher. The special units get little or no support from the govt or the families. Every school is supposed to get 2000 ksh a year per enrolled special needs child from the govt, but some units have received nothing for six years. A typical child gets 1050 a year but that money always comes through. It is complete discrimination. Main stream learners are asked to bring funds to supplement the govt monies, and many do. Special needs parents will not top up as they do not value education for their children. Many of our children don’t have uniform, but if we asked that parent to buy uniform we would never see that child again.’
A Strategy to Shift Attitudes to Disability in Meru, Kenya.
The Problem:
Across the world there are many attitudes to the origins of disability, the status of disabled people and the desirability of their presence in the community. In many cultures disability is attributed to the presence of sin in the disabled person or his or her parents. At other times it is seen as a result of a curse, an evil presence or punishment from God. In many cultures disability is seen not only as something ‘bad’ but also as shameful, casting the whole extended family under a shadow. Such an attitude can result in disabled people being literally invisible in the community, kept in homes away from the sight of others. In terms of the provision of resources they are a low priority and this can cause further health and social complications for them. Since such beliefs are widespread across many cultures, it should come as no surprise that they can be found among the Meru people. The effect of this negative cultural mindset is enormous for disabled children and their families. The combination of poverty, ignorance, and alienation places the mothers under intolerable pressure.
Continued…
Mr Mwiti Nkanata, a Special Needs Teacher in Tigania West writes, ‘In the Kenyan education system every child has a right to education including the disabled. We however have many challenges facing children with disabilities. Many disabled children cannot reach the special schools or units,the special unit teacher will visit their homes regularly to give advice and moral support to parents. While at home these children are mostly locked in the house or tethered behind the house to hide them from visitors and allow their care takers to go to work. By doing this, these children are exposed to harsh weather conditions, hunger and sometimes rape cases are reported.
During our home visits to these families some of the things we encounter are extremely disturbing. Sometimes we meet children with complex disabilities suffering from severe malnutrition, lacking a bed or bedding, infected with jiggers while others are kept completely naked. Most of these children live with their aged grandmothers. After the birth of a disabled child many mothers are deserted by the father. Many mothers get remarried leaving the child behind, remember the mother has to keep news of her disabled child as top secret, failure to which her marriage will break. In most cases these children are seen as a big liability to the family.’
Aims:
- Educate on the causes of disability. Parents and the wider community have no understanding of the medical reasons behind disability. This ignorance feeds the myth of disability being a curse and bad omen.
-Educate on wider health issues. Many of the carers of these disabled children do not have secondary education, they need education on nutrition, water hygiene, first aid etc. We run regular Community Workshops on these topics.
- Encourage Peer support. Mothers and grandmothers can gain strength and encouragement from peer support. We have initiated the forming of 13 disabled family self help groups.
-Provide Medical Support. Due to the hidden nature of disability, and lack of treatment conditions can become significantly worse. FKK are funding weekly mobile physio and nutrition clinics to support families. In time we hope to expand these clinics to offer a wider medical intervention. The need for this can be seen in these words of Mr Nkanata, ‘Many of our disabled children in special schools, units and homebound programs have acquired disability after suffering from preventable diseases like malaria, meningitis, measles and polio. A good number of these cases could have been prevented if proper medication was done at the right time. A good number of mothers with children who have acquired disability simply say the illness was not diagnosed in time or there was no money to take them to hospital.’ We provide a transport allowance to enable the special unit teachers to support families in these situations where possible.
Disability Awareness Day
Annually we hold a Disability Awareness Day for these families, providing transport and a fun day out with sodas and lunch so they can join together and share a sense of community.
FKK have been sponsoring the Disabled Children Awareness and Fun Day events since 2013. The purpose of these days is to encourage the local communities to come together to share experiences, enjoy food, and celebrate what their special needs children can do. An important part of these days is educating on the medical causes of disability, attempting to break down the misunderstanding that disability is the result of a curse or sin. We invite a wide cross section of the community to join us to further spread this learning. Numbers are growing year on year as this is a very popular event!
Mother to Mother Playgroups
These Mother to Mother playgroups currently operate from 8 local health dispensaries, they fulfill a key role in connecting us to parents of young special needs children. When the mother attends the dispensary for the child’s vaccinations the health worker often becomes aware that the child has an additional need. Typically due to shame this child would be hidden from sight, often for years, meaning that opportunities for any medical intervention are gone. But the health worker can invite the mother to attend the monthly playgroup for children with special needs. This group can then become a peer support network for the mother, plus it also enables us to deliver cost effective medical and nutrition support to these young children when they meet together.
Specifically we have undertaken the following activities:-
Distributing food to playgroup mothers in time of crop failure
We have funded the distribution of maize to support mothers under particular hardship during times of food shortage to feed their child at home.
Providing bread and morning porridge for the playgroups
Many of the parents walk a long distance to attend the playgroups and this is often having had little or no food at home that morning. Providing them with bread and milky tea adds to the social element of the playgroup, but also provides very essential nutrition.
Finding a Nutritionist to visit the clinics
A high number of our special needs children are malnourished and require food supplements. These are freely available from the local hospital, but the mothers are generally either not aware of this fact, or they do not have the funds for the journey. We have funded a nutritionist to visit each playgroup and assess the children and provide the nutrition supplements as required.
Facilitating Medical Intervention
During the year we became aware of a three year old girl attending a playgroup who required medical intervention for a cleft palate. Her mother was unaware that this could be remediated. We were able to connect her to another NGO acting in this area, and facilitate her to obtain an operation. We have other children going through a similar process.
Providing an environment for peer to peer support
An important function of the playgroups is to provide a good environment for peer to peer support. Through the year we have continued to resource the groups with chairs and educational play equipment. Where possible we have also provided pushchairs and wheelchairs. In addition both mothers and children from all playgroups have been provided with clothes during the year.
Mobile Physio Clinic
Our mobile Physio clinics rotate weekly through 5 different centres and are staffed by Physio’s from local hospitals. We believe that every child learns at their own pace. Therefore, we support children to learn and develop based on their individual needs and the level where that particular child is in life. For some children who are incontinent and immobile they are home bound. They cannot, and may never be able to join schools because of their complex needs, but an educational health plan is still appropriate for them. Our mobile Physio Clinics work on this principle, developing a home program for each child. A significant part of the health professional’s role is to then train the parents to deliver this program to support the child. These clinics have operated for 4 years, and results have been very encouraging. Individual children have reached milestones that would have been unheard of without intervention However we are aware that so much more is possible for these children if more time was available at the clinics to both assess the child fully or train the parent, and hence we are working to build the Residential Centre as a direct support for these clinics.
Economic Empowerment Student Support Permaculture Fundraising
